Friday, September 17, 2010

About two weeks ago, I made a soup recipe from the Toni Fiore podcast called Curried Zucchini Soup. It was a very simple recipe, and it was seriously good. This week, I bought a ton of curly kale and a bag full of ugly little yellow squash that looked lonely in the reduced for quick sale section. On a night that just felt like a soup evening, my friend Bunnary and I decided to couple the ingredients and make something out of them. It was so scrumptious and perfect with just the right amount of spice and a tremendous amount of flavor. This soup would be good with either yellow or zucchini, but we think the best way would be to mix a bit of both in together. Here's how we made it:

Put just enough oil in the bottom of a soup pot to sauté your onion into submission over medium high heat. Once that goes soft, add the squash and the dry spices, both mild and hot. Get the garlic in there and stir it around just long enough for the garlic aroma to come out of the pot at you. Once that happens, toss in the kale and the liquid. Cover and lower heat. Simmer for about 15-20 minutes until the kale is wilted to a texture you like.

You could serve the soup just like this, but we used the immersion blender to break it up a bit because that's what Toni Fiore did in her recipe for Curried Zucchini Soup, which was the initial inspiration for this soup. It also thickens the soup up a bit, which Bunnary and I both preferred to a brothy texture that evening. If you do use an immersion blender, just pulse it around a bit until you get some thickening. Don't puree the soup. Part of the joy of this particular recipe is the large bites of squash and chewy kale. You don't want to get rid of all that.

Hope you like it as much as we did. It is seriously awesome stuff.

**A note about the spices we used: Here on Okinawa, we enjoy the presence of CocoIchibanya curry houses and the pantry items they sell from the restaurants. The hot curry mix I used is the orange bottle you see in the photo above left. It's VERY hot, and so 1tsp was more than sufficient. Adjust your heat ingredients to your own tastes. I don't like typical yellow Indian curry powders, so I used a McCormick spice mix heavy on ginger. Any curry-like spice mix will work for you.